I've talked before about how crash reporting hasn't yet entered the mainstream of available services from open source hosting sites. GNU Savannah, Sourceforge, Google Code, none of them provide crash reporting to their customers. If your program crashes in the field, you either need your user to report a bug manually or you need to implement or reuse a crash reporting system, but more importantly, you also need to host your own crash reporting service.
I've talked before on how this is really a shame especially considering that Google produces breakpad, certainly good enough for the C and C++ community to start improving the quality of their software thanks to good crash reporting and some projects definitely are, albeit, again, using their own servers.
To this day, Microsoft is the only company that is hosting an error reporting service that it makes available to all developers in the form of Windows Error Reporting. Kudos to Microsoft for this effort.
I've been very enthusiastic about my jump from C++ to the Java platform, or to a much lesser extent the .Net (Compact) platform. The reasons for this aren't related to language features, C++ armed with smart pointers and modern libraries and idioms can easily compete with the Java 5 language and C#.
No, the reason is how much richness is kept in the compiled binary format representation of these platforms. Of course, the massive advantage of Java over, well, pretty much everything else, in the number of high quality libraries that are available certainly helps too. The point being if you've had to deal with post-mortem debugging before, the rich and high quality stack traces you can get from a Java exception versus the information you get from a minidump file is night and day. You can't get this from a C or C++ program even if you do all your symbol generation correctly because a lot of good and necessary information is optimized away. While with the other two, the non optimized version is still available on disk since it's compiled just in time.
Taking a step back here for a second to talk about ahead of time versus just in time compilation. I'm not too familiar with .Net outside of the compact edition but the performance of Java SE 6 is simply amazing, I've done enough high level C++ to know that Java SE 6 beats it hands down performance wise. Forgetting the ton of adaptive optimizations that the HotSpot virtual machine can do here for a moment, one of the major reason for this is the heap. Heap implementations in C++ are still based on C's malloc which isn't exactly good at dealing with tons of little polymorphic object allocations. C's malloc is still geared toward the C program, you allocate a bunch of memory at start up and you use that as a pool until your program ends. Not exactly friendly to a high level C++ program nor a multi-threaded one.
Getting back on track here, the lack of error reporting services unfortunately extend to the Java world. Even the tree major Java hubs out there, in addition to the tree named at the start of this post, namely java.net, Apache and Codehaus do not provide crash reporting services. I guess Apache is off the hook since they provide mostly libraries and server software, but still, much could be done in the area of crash reporting.
All of this brings me to how NetBeans handles unhandled exceptions that occur in the wild. NetBeans pops up this little dialog and asks you to send in your report. Once you do send it, it's almost magical, reports are queued, analyzed, associated to either a new report or an existing report and finally the generic reports are associated to an issue in IssueZilla and it does it all automatically. If the issue is fixed, it even tells you in which, upcoming or not, version it has been fixed.
This is how it should be done. I don't know what license this system is under, but how about getting this into the greater community? Let's get this system moved from being NetBeans specific to all projects hosted at java.net for example. And what's really nice about this is that it doesn't have to be limited to Java SE/EE, this can work just fine with Java ME too. Now, wouldn't that be something?
